About Time

the experience of it

I have had a bone to pick with those who decided 24 hours constituted a day, 7 days a week and 28/30/31 a month and 12 months a year. How they came up with these numbers, I don’t know (apart from the 24-hour one). The rest just seem very whimsical. It would be one thing to use it as a measure devoid of any meaning, just to mark the passage of hours, but it has taken on more. Time is now a measure of quickness, rate of growth of career, apparent wisdom collected because of days spent on earth, demands placed on respect bestowed to people based on the years they have spent alive.

time is now a standard.

time is something you must make your bitch, in order to achieve things fastest, quickest, firstmost.

The above are all made on the assumption that we all experience time in the same way. This is, of course, a ridiculous assumption that has been made so we can standardise life experience and expectations for all human beings.

Neurodivergent writer Marta Rose writes that the standard measures of time we take for granted are Industrial Time, based on a factory model of work, geared towards maximum output and productivity. This is how most of us live in time, we mark our passage by passing milestones - finishing school, finishing college, masters, working and somewhere along the way a partner, and if you are keen, a family and then retirement and death. We benchmark ourselves and our output based on our peers who are following the same schedule passed down to us, not noticing that as we cram a lot of our milestones in the first 30 years of our life, it leaves the rest of it barren, which can seem like an interminable passage or you can pepper it with milestones like having x number of children, and then their life milestones become how you measure your relative success or failure.

HOW BORING.

I spent a lot of my initial decade following this set pattern, and then pandemic + relationship trauma + burnout had me reeling. I am not the only one to have gone through this specific cocktail, my generation has many examples. It has been 5 years since the pandemic started, 4 since my divorce, and 3 since I quit my job. I am now finally on the precipice of making a big decision. Corporate culture asks you to pivot when an existing idea or a plan doesn’t work. This is an act that is expected to happen overnight, just like the moment it takes to pronounce the word - pivot - 2 syllables and dream up another plan and get moving. But sometimes, it takes years to pivot, to emerge from the murky process of healing, wiping clean all that you considered sacred, and collecting all your resources (people, money, spoons) and finally making the change.

In spiral time, “progress” does not move toward a fixed spot somewhere in the immediate future. “Goals” are not a destination we can see clearly and move toward on a linear path. We (neurodivergents/neuroemergents) don’t identify a goal and move toward it in a linear, efficient, straightforward manner, free of distraction and passion—because that's not how our minds work. Our minds are all about connection, relationship, the bigger picture. - Marta Rose

The image is of a spiral formed by light coming from celestial objects and is purple and pink. This image contains nearly a million seconds worth of Chandra observing time (purple) along with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, and blue). Image from the Smithsonian.

This newsletter has been evidence of my struggling with milestones, benchmarks, ideas of success and my apparent failure. But I have been looking around for a few years now, and there are surely more like me. We are whispered about, ignored, and checked up on only on social media, that weird friend you have whose life is a curiosity for you and an object of gossip, but we are there.

Another group of people who experience time differently are trans folks. “Trans folks often experience non-linear life-courses which include disruption, disjuncture, and discontinuity of time. We might go through more than one puberty, with the second adolescence occurring later in life, which we experience in diverse, creative ways” - Meg John Barker in Trans: Adventurers Across Time and Space. Trans people have for years taken social rulebooks, pulled out pages and written their own.

“The concept of queer time offers an alternative to the notion that one ought to discontinue particular practices or behaviors simply because one has “aged out” of them.” - Queering Time

“Hi Shreya, do you mean that only Neurodivergents, Queer and Trans folks experience time this way?”

Thanks for the question, other part of my brain. I know the non linear experience and expectation from time is not only an ND and queer experience. People from varying economic backgrounds experience time differently, and people healing from grief and trauma also experience time differently. So that must mean that this is a larger feeling, and hence everyone must have examples around them and find support. Right?

Screenshot of an Instagram post by Gaysi. There is a light pink border with text that says: Theoretically Speaking. Inside the border, there are two sections. The black background has text in white: Queer time is both. magical and nonlinear dance of self-discovery. On a white background is black text: it is where too late and right on time both lose meaning. There is an image of a clock melting.

I have stopped counting the number of friendships I have lost since my life started looking wonky to others. But I have looked around and found people doing life differently. And they won’t always look like you, but they are there. It takes time to find them, it takes even more time to admit you may be like them, and it takes forever to let go of the guilt of not meeting your intended milestones.

I don’t write this for those like me, we have found our support systems, niches and chat groups and venting spaces. I am writing this for you, the one still able to match the milestones.

Here are some things you can do for your friends outside of time:

• Be nice. No, you aren’t being nice. Talking about your life isn’t being nice.

• Ask questions. Be curious. You have so much to learn from them. And you will go to them once you find yourself out of sync with others.

• Offer help. Are they struggling to write a CV? Do you know what the newest words are that make algorithms go nuts? TELL THEM. Pay for that meal, you can afford it.

• Stop comparing their life with yours. Don’t say that you are jealous of their life. It is hard to be them. They don’t need to live for you.

• Our lives are not anecdotes. We aren’t tokens. Stop gossiping about us, and looking up our socials so you can feel the rush of experiences you are too scared to have.

• Make space for weird. I understand there is comfort in homogeneity, but don’t lose out on your friends who are taking the world by its horns and making it sit and listen to them. They are brave, often they are faking it, make space for them.

Be a better friend.

If you’re out of time like me and Loki, look around, there are friends. Or if you are reading this, you have me.

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I have been reading a lot and umm, have gotten into podcasts when they may be losing relevance.

Read:

Have you read The Hunger Games? Do you know Suzanne Collins wrote two whole prequels that will just blow your mind? I spent 6 days devouring 5 books. Makes for a good holiday. This article will help you get inside her brain: https://www.polygon.com/analysis/547538/hunger-games-suzanne-collins-explained-meaning

Listen:

Culture Study Podcast by Anne Helen Petersen. Against Budget Culture really was something I needed to hear.

If you love a good cookbook like me, you would want to know How a cookbook is made.

Watch:

Dying for Sex: If you thought Babygirl was BDSM, allow yourself to be re-educated by this excellent show. It has so many tender moments about friendship, claiming power through sex and understanding kink and consent.